Announced today on the College Publisher blog, the partnership between College Publisher and Roo, a video network, is ending in March:
Due to changing needs of multi-media presentation from our partners and the evolution of web technology for video, we have decided to transition away from ROO video players to our own solution. At the end of March, the ROO video players will be not be displayed on CMN newspaper sites.
The partnership didn’t last long. It was announced at the end of April, 2007. We never used the Roo system at the Daily Eastern News, but if I were using it, I’d be a little bit miffed that they are pulling out of the web sites in the middle of the school year.
CP is rolling out a new version of its publishing platform, using the Polopoly Content Management System, which is supposed to include a built-in video platform that will allow users to put video content anywhere on their site. The big caveat, as mentioned in the CP blog post cited above, is that the solution they have doesn’t transcode video files into Flash (.flv) format.
What that means is that if you are using iMovie to produce a video, you can upload your .mov file to the CP system, but unlike, say, YouTube, that video won’t be transcoded into Flash format. Why would that be important? Quicktime movies are broadly supported, but Flash movies (.flv) are supported by many more browsers (according to Adobe statistics, fwiw).
So your options are to encode your own Flash movie, using the Flash video encoder, or use another transcoding service. And for folks who were using Roo (I don’t know how many there are), you’ll need to find another stop-gap measure to get through the semester.
YouTube is one option. Blip.tv is a second option that we’ve used at CICM. In some ways, using an outside service to host your videos can be a good thing, since it will give your student videos a much wider audience than if the videos were just placed on your own web site.
I wrote about the Roo Ingest video upload feature in June of 2007.
on Feb 21st, 2008 at 7:16 pm
We are using Blip to host our videos at thespartandaily.com because I did not like the CP/Roo player and the instruction on how to use it were not at all helpful. I am really happy with blip.tv.
on Feb 21st, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Bryan, you may have a better feel than I do, since I imagine you look at more college newspaper web sites than I do — but in my opinion, the CP/ROO Player was a complete disaster from the start and its demise will have minimal impact on most college papers.
The ROO deal was put together by the old CP/Y2M management team, and while I’m sure they had good intentions, the execution of the front page player and the ROO page on each site was just a mess. The ROO-provided front-page videos usually weren’t even close to relevant to the target market, and the full video page was a jumbled, incoherent mess. Our editors never let it go live on our site. I periodically checked it on other CP sites, and it never seemed to improve. I had provided CP with a bunch of feedback on how I thought the videos page could be re-designed, but I think once they lost the original CP programming team, it seemed clear it wasn’t ever going to be touched.
When our editors decided to jump into video this past fall, they never considered using the ROO player. I guess some papers do use it, although I have no idea how many and suspect it’s a *very* small number.
I don’t know enough about the transcoding issue to judge whether that’s significant or not. Although Flash Player is much more widely available in that stat from Adobe on worldwide computer usage, I’d just venture a guess that QuickTime is not too far behind Flash on the computers of the audiences college newspaper web sites primarily aim to reach. I also imagine transcoding could be added by CP and/or Polopoly in the future if it turns out to be a very desirable feature; meanwhile, the ease of uploading and deploying video on web sites with no more work than still images are now used ought to make it easier for more papers to present more video to their readers.